John Harrison was a self-educated English carpenter and clockmaker. He invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought after device for solving the problem of establishing the East-West position or longitude of a ship at sea, thus revolution...

James Lind was a Scottish physician. He was a pioneer of naval hygiene in the Royal Navy. By conducting the first ever clinical trial, he developed the theory that citrus fruits cured scurvy. He argued for the health benefits of better vent...

Guillaume Le Gentil was a French astronomer. He discovered what are now known as the Messier objects M32, M36 and M38, as well as the nebulosity in M8, and he was the first to catalogue the dark nebula sometimes known as Le Gentil 3 (in the...

Filippo Antonio Pasquale di Paoli, was a Corsican patriot and leader, the president of the Executive Council of the General Diet of the People of Corsica. Paoli designed and wrote the Constitution of this first democratic republic of the...

Henry Cavendish was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper "On Factitious Airs". Antoine La...

George Washington was the first, and only nonpartisan, President of the United States (1789–97), the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He...

Túpac Amaru II (executed in Cuzco May 18, 1781) was a leader of an indigenous uprising in 1780 against the Spanish in Peru. Although unsuccessful, he later became a mythical figure in the Peruvian struggle for independence and indigenous ri...

Sir Frederick William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer and composer who became famous for discovering Uranus. He also discovered infrared radiation and made many other discoveries in astronomy.
He played the cello besides th...

William Smellie was a Scottish master printer, naturalist, antiquary, editor and encyclopedist. At the age of 28, Smellie was hired by Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell to edit the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which appeare...

François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, also Toussaint Bréda, was a leader of the Haitian Revolution. Born in Saint-Domingue, in a long struggle for independence Toussaint led enslaved Africans and Afro-Haitians to victory over French colo...

Jean-Baptiste de la Marck, often just known as "Lamarck", was a French soldier, naturalist, academic and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. In the modern era, Lamarck is re...

In 1795 Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre was admitted to the Bureau des Longitudes, becoming President in 1800. In 1801 he was appointed secretary to the Académie des Sciences making him the most powerful figure in science in France.
In 17...

Jenner was an English physician and pupil of John Hunter, a pioneer in comparative anatomy and morphology. Jenner's invaluable experiments, beginning in 1796 with the vaccination of eight-year-old James Phipps, proved that cowpox provided i...

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was a German astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name. She was the younger sist...

Joseph Marie Charles Jacquard was a French weaver and merchant. He played an important role in the development of the earliest programmable loom (the "Jacquard loom"), which in turn played an important role in the development of other progr...